Revolutionary Road
Choose one Yates/Carver story and explore it in depth drawing attention to the links that can be usefully established with Revolutionary Road and any other American texts you have read. Try to identify and contextualise how the story reflects key themes in 20th Century American fiction.
The B.A.R. Man, a short story by Richard Yates, was written around the same time as the author's most famous novel Revolutionary Road. The two tales contain a number of clear parallels and similar themes that result largely from the context within which they were created. I will identify and discuss some of these links in Yates' writing whilst looking at the state of the American society and the arts in the 50s to try to gain an insight into the ideas behind these texts.
The first obvious thing the reader notices, even before beginning to read the narrative is the witty titles Yates gives to his work. The B.A.R. Man refers primarily to the military position that the main character used to hold, but the title also hints to, as the reader soon realises, his lonely journeys into bars. These two images of the character juxtapose; one proper and upstanding and the other a leech on society. The title Revolutionary Road is also ironic, as Yates said himself that he meant the title to suggest that the revolutionary road of 1776
had come to something very much like a dead end in the fifties.' It is no coincidence that in the novel the road leads to nothing more than a dead end, ending in a close. In their own ways both sad stories make it quite clear, the hope of another kind of brave revolution had definitely vanished.
Once into the body of the text the similarities between the heroes John Fallon and Frank Wheeler quickly emerge. Fallon works in a big insurance company' spending most of his time among the file cabinets with a conscientious frown.' Both Fallon and Wheeler are nobodies working grudgingly for large corporations only as a...
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